Cryptocurrency Mining For Dummies - EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 Superclocked Review

Welcome to another edition of Cryptocurrency Mining for Dummies!

GeForce GTX 1060 Superclocked Graphics Card

Over the Christmas Holiday, I acquired a couple EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 Superclocked graphics cards to beef up one of my mining rigs. The Superclocked version of the cards were on sale at Newegg.com and with the rebate were only $190 each.

With Bitcoin prices riding high and pulling the price of Alt-coins higher, these cards had an expected return on investment of about 60 days. Unfortunately there was a limit of two on these cards, otherwise I would have purchased a couple more.

The cards have a single fan and a small footprint which enables you to fit them in a tight rig where space is a premium. Another nice feature is they only draw 120 watts of power and require a 6 pin power connector, so you can run 4 cards on only 1 mid-sized power supply.

The Superclocked card has a Core Clock speed of 1607 MHz, with a Boost Clock speed of 1835 verses the standard card which has a Core Clock speed of 1506 MHz and a Boost Clock speed of 1708 MHz. That 7% speed boost can add a lot of coins to your wallet over the years.

Performance

By selecting the 1060 card on Whattomine.com we get the expected performance for different algorithms.

But since this is a Superclocked card, I expect the performance to be a little better. So I ran several popular algorithms to test the cards actual performance and compared them to the expected results.

First I tested Equihash

then Cryptonight

followed by Neoscrypt

Lyra2REv2

and finally LBRY.

I also benchmarked Bitcore

and Keccak.

This will give me an idea of the cards performance with those algorithms since they can be some of the better paying algorithms at times.

The table below shows the resulting increase of the actual over the estimated performance.

Algorithm	Estimated	Actual	% Increase
Equihash	270	290	7.4%
Cryptonight	430	435	1.2%
Neoscrypt	500	629	25.8%
Lyra2REv2	20.3	22	8.4%
LBRY	170	175	2.9%

As you can see, the Superclocked card offers almost no advantage for Cryptonight based coins, but a huge advantage for Neoscrypt coins and lesser advantages for the other algorithms.

After plugging in the actual hash rates for the different algorithms, I was able to see that currently Smartcash is the most profitable coin to mine at over $3 a day profit.

Another advantage to mining Smartcash is that if you hold over 1000 coins in your wallet for over a month you can receive bonus coins through Smartrewards. You can learn more about Smartrewards at the official Smartcash website.

In Conclusion

All in all, I am very happy with my purchase of these new cards. I think they will prove to be a very profitable purchase in the months to come.

Until next time...